Spend Matters — Upward and Onward

Ever since it became clear a couple of years back that Spend Matters had become a major player in online media space for the procurement, trade and supply chain sectors, I've struggled to figure how best to tweak the business model to capitalize on both the influence and traffic the site has garnered. Throughout this period, in all honesty, I've felt my time has been best spent by continuing to crank out editorial copy rather than investing a lot of effort in how to grow this thing past a certain stage from a revenue perspective. The challenge with this approach has been that while traffic on the site has continued to increase, traditional publishers have done a far better job monetizing their traffic and lists than we have. Earlier this year, it became clear through various conversations with practitioners and providers that there were a few tweaks we could make to the model that would allow both groups to get more from their readership and affiliation with the site.

The first change, which many of you saw earlier this year, was a new Spend Matters offering, Spend Matters Perspectives. Spend Matters Perspectives are meant to serve their named purpose -- to provide opinion and commentary on a subject, albeit in more space than a blog post allows. So far, we've launched four of these, and have a number of others in varying stages of production and research. Practitioners, consultants and academics have given us, for the most part, decent to excellent feedback on the usefulness of what we've published. For providers, Spend Matters Perspectives offer a new type of demand creation and marketing tool to use in their own lead generation programs. For everyone else, they provide a chance to learn more about a subject from an opinionated and analytical tone (which while some might not always agree with, does provide insight and analysis with an informed angle).

The second change that we are announcing today is an enhanced sponsorship model. We will continue to offer the Lead Sponsor offering of before, and have added a new Sponsor Index that provides greater detail on the capabilities of Spend Matters’ sponsors. In addition, we just launched, earlier this morning, our new Spend Matters Associate Sponsor program. Associate Sponsorship will allow a larger number of providers to become involved with Spend Matters. We are thrilled that Ariba and Paladin Associates have become our first two Associate Sponsors. For further information on the specific benefits of Lead Sponsorship and Associate Sponsorship programs and the costs of each program, please get in touch with our VP of Sales and Business Development, William Busch (wbusch@spendmatters.com). More information on these and other offerings is also available in our recently updated Spend Matters background PDF.

The third recent change, that we'll be talking much more about in the coming weeks, is a completely new version of Spend Matters Navigator. While I'll save the specifics of our Navigator enhancements for a future post next week, we believe that the new site will provide a greatly enhanced ability to not only identify and find relevant procurement and supply chain news and information, but also discover relationships between subjects that were previously difficult to unearth in traditional search environments.

These are exciting times for Spend Matters. Over the past six months we have continued to increase our traffic. More importantly, we are consistently told that the opinion and influence of the site is more relevant than its reach. Along with the other blog that I consider to be top notch in the broad Spend Management space, Sourcing Innovation, we continue to prove that it's possible to build a business with a blog as the foundational core. Thanks for taking the time to read Spend Matters and for your continued support of this little cost cutting corner of Internet.